The oldest trees are distinguished by having the foliage and
small branches at the
BSHIRRAI.
[p.20]top only, and by four, five, or even seven trunks springing from
one base; the branches and foliage of the others were lower, but I saw
none whose leaves touched the ground, like those in Kew Gardens. The
trunks of the old trees are covered with the names of travellers and
other persons, who have visited them: I saw a date of the seventeenth
century. The trunks of the oldest trees seem to be quite dead; the wood
is of a gray tint; I took off a piece of one of them; but it was
afterwards stolen, together with several specimens of minerals, which I
sent from Zahle to Damascus.
At an hour and a quarter from the Cedars, and considerably below them,
on the edge of a rocky descent, lies the village of Bshirrai, on the
right bank of the river Kadisha [Arabic].
October 3d.--Bshirrai consists of about one hundred and twenty houses.
Its inhabitants are all Maronites, and have seven churches. At half an
hour from the village is the Carmelite convent of Deir Serkis (St.
Sergius,) inhabited at present by a single monk, a very worthy old man,
a native of Tuscany, who has been a missionary to Egypt, India, and
Persia.
Nothing can be more striking than a comparison of the fertile but
uncultivated districts of Bekaa and Baalbec, with the rocky mountains,
in the opposite direction, where, notwithstanding that nature seems to
afford nothing for the sustenance of the inhabitants, numerous villages
flourish, and every inch of ground is cultivated. Bshirrai is surrounded
with fruit trees, mulberry plantations, vineyards, fields of Dhourra,
and other corn, though there is scarcely a natural plain twenty feet
square. The inhabitants with great industry build terraces to level the
ground and prevent the earth from being swept down by the winter rains,
and at the same time to retain the water requisite for the irrigation of
their crops. Water is very abundant, as streams from numerous springs
descend
KANOBIN.
[p.21]on every side into the Kadisha, whose source is two hours distant
from Bshirrai, in the direction of the mountain from whence I came.
Bshirrai belongs to the district of Tripoli, but is at present, with the
whole of the mountains, in the hands of the Emir Beshir, or chief of the
Druses. The inhabitants of the village rear the silk-worm, have
excellent plantations of tobacco, and a few manufactories of cotton
stuffs used by the mountaineers as shawls for girdles. Forty years ago
the village was in the hands of the Metaweli, who were driven out by the
Maronites.
In the morning I went to Kanobin; after walking for two hours and a half
over the upper plain, I descended the precipitous side of a collateral
branch of the valley Kadisha, and continued my way to the convent, which
I reached in two hours and a half.
